A great imaginative novel could be writtten about the Greek composer Nikos Skalkottas, who lived from 1904 to 1949. As a young man – ‘lively, ironic and combative’ – he studied the violin at the Athens Conservatoire. After winning a gold medal for his performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which according to contemporary accounts was distinguished by its exceptionally economical and discerning use of vibrato, he proceeded to Berlin, with every prospect of becoming a world-famous virtuoso. By the mid-1920s, however, he had decided to make his career as a composer. After a short period of study with Philipp Jarnach and Kurt Weill he went on to Schoenberg, who thought so highly of his talent that a quarter of a century later, knowing none of the music Skalkottas had meanwhile written, he named him among the few real composers he had taught in Berlin.

In 1933, shocked by the advent of the Nazi regime, Skalkottas left Berlin; after a time in Sweden, of which little is known, he returned to Athens, as Mozart had returned to equally provincial Salzburg after the double failure of his grand tour and his great love in Mannheim and Paris. For Skalkottas, ten years older than Mozart had been when his crisis came, there was a black period of three years when he wrote nothing. Then he broke into flower again, composing ceaselessly and, to judge by the size of his output, effortlessly. Genius is, among other things, an infinite capacity for taking pain and transmuting it to other people's pleasure. But the combative personality was, to all appearances, gone; there had been a withdrawal from the world, the onset of a divine indifference that, rather than inhibiting action, allowed something to speak through the hole where the ego had been; Mozart had reacted rather similarly after Aloysia Weber turned him down. And as Hans Keller once pointed out, Skalkottas was not concerned with himself even to the extent of critically destroying any of his music, as the comparably fluent and fractured Brahms had been. He composed; he played his violin again, for money, in whatever orchestra was to hand; he lived, if you call it living, and in 1946, at the age of forty-two, he married.